Watching the Discovery Channel
by Quarto
Summary: Putting people with whom you are acquainted in your mind palace can be a useful sorting and categorization technique. Trouble can arise when they aren't simply content to provide information. Sometimes opinions are included.


Molly's shift had finished twenty minutes ago. Sherlock still had thirty more PCRs to prep and he no longer considered it appropriate to finagle her into providing those services for him, so he stayed at his workstation in the laminar flow hood. But when she left, he stood up, and kissed her smooth cheek, and wished her a pleasant evening.

They did that sort of thing now, because they were good friends again. Surely that was enough.

"You may, in fact, be the stupidest man alive."

"Shut up, Mary," he muttered… possibly out loud, because a technician passing by gave him an alarmed glance.

"A _beautiful_ woman, devastatingly intelligent, _fancies_ you, finds you interesting rather than creepy-" Mary sing-songed from her seat on the benchtop next to the gas chromatograph.

"I am well aware of Doctor Hooper's numerous personal advantages, thank you."

"You two have _even_ said you love one another. And here you're sitting on your arse doing DNA analysis on a seventy-year-old cold case that's barely a four when you could go _be with her_?"

Sherlock slapped his palm onto the bench and immediately regretted it, since his fingers were still splinted.

"You may not have noticed, Mary," he said precisely, "That it was under terrible circumstances, that she and I were forced into it, that I made her cry again-"

He stopped. It was ridiculous to quarrel with your own brain. Not that that had ever stopped him before.

"No, I caught that. Which is why," Mary said, " _You_ have to put on your big boy pants and actually tell her that 'I love you' came with an implicit 'In the way that involves us living happily ever after together and making loads of brilliant, beautiful, bizarre babies."

"Molly's childfree by choice, and _I'm_ not particularly inclined to inflict the Holmes genotype onto another generation," Sherlock informed her, loftily, pressing tubes onto the vortexer to mix them.

"Ugh," Mary rolled her eyes, "Fine. 'In the way that involves us snogging at crime scenes, dissecting things for fun, and making passionate love while never being interrupted by high-pitched psychopaths constantly requiring clean nappies.'"

Mary frowned at her last remark.

"Which is not the most flattering way you could think of _my_ namesake, now is it?"

"Molly's got no reason to trust my intentions, I have repeatedly demonstrated that I am unfit to be an acceptable romantic partner to her-"

"Ah, misguided chivalry," Mary interrupted him, "Perfectly valid reason to spend the second half of your life making sad eyes at her whenever her back is turned and never getting your willy squeezed."

"My wi-" Sherlock slotted the vials into the centrifuge, "Could you possibly have chosen a more revolting way to describe that?"

Mary folded her arms, raised her eyebrows, and said, flatly, "Having your knob… _moistened_."

"Please don't."

"Riding the bone train to pound town. You _do_ stock a surprising inventory of these euphemisms, don't you?" she laughed delightedly.

"Stop. It."

"Please. If you didn't want me to mock you about it you could have left me in charge of 'childminding,' 'cooking,' and 'murder methods, nontedious.' But no, I die and all of a sudden you want me to handle 'love' and _this_ is what me doing that involves. Oooh, _gland to gland combat_."

"Did you really make fun of me this much when you were alive?" he asked, curiously.

"Less than fifty percent as much, though it's possible you didn't always notice when I did," Mary replied, after due consideration, "You _may_ have some self image issues going on. And that's why you aren't listening to me, isn't it? You're _scared._ Not for her, for yourself. You think you're going to screw it up badly enough that she won't want you anymore and that the formerly efficient organ that pumps your blood will break."

Sherlock, sullenly, moved his samples into the sequencer. Eventually, grudgingly, he said, "-Maybe."

Mary shrugged.

"She might. It does happen… though for most people the first experiences with that _do_ happen roughly twenty years earlier so it's not such a shock by this point, you great emotionally constipated lout. I loved John, and he could have broken my heart. He loves me, and I _did_ break his."

She sighed, and swung her legs.

"It's really like jumping off a building, isn't it? Mostly you crash. But every now and then… you land safely. It helps if there's someone already down there to catch you."

Sherlock looked at her, and Mary looked straight back.

"Then when you land there's wonderful adventures to follow," she smiled down at him, "But you _do_ have to take the leap first. And I never mistook you for a coward, Sherlock Holmes."

Sherlock looked at his battered hands, and said, "Molly takes the tube home."

"At this time of night you could _easily_ beat her there in a taxi, especially if she stops to run errands on the way. So go. See if she's up for a bit of oscillating the unmentionables."

"I hate you."

"No, you don't," she said, and vanished.

Though on his way out the door he _did_ hear a faint, "You've been smoking, so do have a mint beforehand."


End file.
